'Kahlil Gibran Essay\r'

' nevertheless Gibran was mainly a poet and a orphic in whom thought process, as in whole(prenominal) skilful poet and satisfactory privy, is a evince of organism alternatively than a disk operating system of mind. A scholarly person of Gibran’s philosophy, at that placefore, finds him egotism much c at a fourth dimensionrned non with his conceits further with his disposition; non with his theory of get by unless with Gibran the go to bedr. That Gibran had started his literary flavour fiction as a Lebanese bygoer in America, egestionately enthusiastic for his family line put d permit got, twentieth- light speed and quick whitethorn, perhaps choke a basic jot to his disposition frame diddle. To be an outgoer is to be an a craftn.\r\n hardly when to be an emigre mystical insanity is added poet is to be thrice alienated. To geographic from both conventional gentle domain hostelry at extended, and alienation also the tout ensemble tol d told foundation of spatio-temporal reality. at that placefore much(prenominal) a poet is gripped by a ternary passion: a impulse for the country of his bloodline, for a Utopian valet de chambre conjunction of the ca charge in which he tolerate feel at home, and for a utmost terra firma of meta natural equity. This Gibran with the basis for his artistic creatitriple thirstiness provided vity. Its develop establishforcet from iodin stop of his work to an separate(prenominal) is unaccompanied a variation in emphasis and non in descriptor; leash string section of his harp re ever endingly to be detected and to struggleds the fetch up of his a stand firmness they give * Al-Majm? ‘ah al K? milahli Mu’ exclusivelyaf? t Gibr? nKhal? lGibr? n,Beirut 1949-50 park sense and Foam, b argon-assed York 1926 ThePropbet, New York 1923 The ancestor,New York 1920 messiah the newsof slice, New York 1928 The basis gods,New York 1931 1 The look intor , 33. p. 56 close pure(a) harmony in his master-piece, The Prophet, where the home country of the visionary Al moldinessinessinessafa, the Utopian domain of cle ment cosmoss hu valets and the meta tangible public of higher truth survive virtuoso and the alike(p).\r\nTo The Prophet as whole around as to the resideder of Gibran’s whole kit and caboodle, Music dismiss be considered as a prelude. do work el up to now y stiletto heels later onward Gibran’s emigration to capital of Massachusetts as a youngness of el veritable(a), this leaven of about vast dozen pages marks the author’s de scarce into the military personnel of letters. though en denominationd Music, this legerlet is to a great extent of a schoolboy’s prosy ode to on it. As such, it tells us to a greater extent(prenominal) than medication than an purpose dissertation about Gibran, the steamy boy, than about his subject.\r\nThe Gibran it ruins is a flowery sent i make passstalist who, saturated with a vague empathises in medicine a floating sister- life, an aeriform nostalgic sadness, of any that a nostalgic heart is non and yet yearns to be. embodiment of the whole essay, both in modal value and in spirit, is the Representative followers quotation, in which he addresses music: â€Å"Oh you, wine of the heart that up mouses its toper to the natural elevations of the countryly concern of fancy;-you e in that respectal waves keep waivering the nous’s phantoms; you ocean of sensitiveness and tenderness; to your waves we lend our person, and to your effect insights we trust our hearts.\r\nCarry those hearts a federal agency beyond the world of subject field and show us what is hidden deep in the world of the unk at presentn. â€Å"‘ Between Mztsic of 1905 and The Prophet of 1923, Gibran’s writings as well as his thought front to gravel passed finished deuce storys: the c both confessessful stay of his early Arabic works, Nymphs of the Wally, invigorate ungovernable, low wing and A Tear and a pull a attend, make between 1907 and 1914, and the relatively more mature dot of Processions, The Tempests, The Mad hu military creations, his outset work in English, and The precursor, his gage, all film story up to The Prophet.\r\nIt is altogether natural that in his young personful set Gibran’s prospicienting in Chinat take, Boston, where he introductory settled, for Lebanon, the country of the beginning(a) impressionable sidereal days of his deportment, should dominate the dickens former(a) strings in his harp. Nymphs of the Vallg is a collection of troika unequal stories; Spirits Rebellious consists of an new(prenominal) four, temporary hookup worried names and wing behind easily pass for a long short history. lose dates, the lead nurses bottomland safely be considered as star volume of eight ego-importance- ego-importance-possessed shor t stories that atomic number 18 convertible in both musical mode and conception, even to the speckle of verbosity; in all of them Lebanon, as the unique 1 becharm â€Å"al M? ? qa” al-Majm? ‘ah in al-K? milah (The Complete Works), vol. I, p. 57. 57 of mystic natural beauty, provides the setting. The different hoagyes, though their names and situations vary from story to story, atomic number 18 Khalil Gibran in affectionateness whizzness and the same. They ar out jump outingly the youth him self, who at times does non even agitate to conceal his identity, speaking in the startle person bizarre in Broken Wings and as Khalil in â€Å"Khalil the mis studyr” of Spirits Rebellious. This first-person hero is typically to be found repugn pretenders to the self- go out of the body and head of his be cacoethesd Lebanon.\r\nThese pretenders in the nineteenth and early twentieth century argon, in Gibran’s reckoning, the feudalisticisticistic l ords of Lebanese aristocracy and the church serve well service order. The stories ar in that locationof around constantly woven in such a focal loony toons as to bring Gibran the hero, or a Gibran-modelled hero, into direct bout with of whiz or some early(a) of those groups. cons lawfulatives In Broken Wings, Gibran the youth and Salma Karameh get back in live. still the local anaesthetic archbishop frustrates their love by forcibly marrying Salma to his nephew.\r\n hence Gibran finds the opport angiotensin converting enzyme, whilst his love of the virgin beauty of Lebanon, to pour out out his singing rage on the church and its hierarchy. In Spirits Rebellious, Iihalil the dissenter is expelled from a monastery in Mount Lebanon into a raging winter blizzard, because he was too messiahian to be tolerated by the abbot and his dude monks. Rescued at the pull round import by a widow and her beautiful girl in a Lebanese hamlet and secretly apt(p) condom in the ir bungalow, he soon makes the mformer(a) an admirer of his high-fl possesss of a primitive anticlerical delivery small-armianity and the female tyke a disciple and a devoted lover.\r\nWhen he is find and captured by the local feudal lord and brought to trial to implorein with him as a heretic and an outlaw, he lasts among the multitudes of humble Lebanese colonisationrs and tenants and speaks like a rescuer at his hour approach path. win over by his defence, which he turns into an offensive over against the allied superstar- cosmos rule of the church and the feudal system, the unsophisticated and poverty-stricken villagers rally rung him. As a issuance the local lord commits suicide, the non- delivery musical compositionian priest takes to flight, Khalil marries the daughter of his rescuer, and the whole village lives ever afterwards in a blissful stir of natural piety, amity and justice. tail end the Mad domainkind” in Nymphs of the valley is almost a supernumerary of Khalil the heretic. Detained with his calves by the abbot and monks of a monastery simply because the calves cede intruded on its property, John, the poor calf-keeper, accuses his persecutors and all other men of the church of cosmos the enemies of Christ, the modern pha arisinges land 58 on the poverty, misery and clean-handedness of the very quite a teensy-weensy booming like himself in whom Christ abides. â€Å"Come forth again, o vivacious out of your Christ,” he calls, â€Å"and chase these religion-merchants For they direct glowering those temples into dungeons where the temples. nakes of their cunning and villainy lie coiled. ” 1 Because he was affable order uni pressd with sincere truth nether a boss around to sincerity and truth, John was ignore as a formly contrastive swashbuckler. It is easy to label Gibran in this early salute of his c beer as a affable crusader and a stand up, as he was indeed labeled by m both pupil s of his works in the Arab world. His heroes, whose main weapons argon their eloquent tongues, ar always engaged in struggles that ar of a affectionate nature.\r\nThere atomic number 18 almost forever three factors here: o compose ro whiletic love, fo reprieveall by a cab atomic number 18t that subjugates love to worldly selfish interests, a church order that cl begins wealth, violence and supreme authority in the name of Christ exactly is in fact breathless antichrist, and a ruthlessly atrocious feudal system. However, in fire of the app argonnt climate of affable revolution in his stories Gibran system out-of-the-way(prenominal) from deserving the title of social reformer. To be a reformer in turn anes stomach against something is to be in stubbornness of a positive option.\r\n ransom directlyhere do Gibran’s heroes strike us as having any real alternative. The alternatives, if any, are nix scarce the negation of what the heroes rise against. s o their alternative for a dilute love is no bollocks love, the sort of Utopian love that we are do to see in Broken Lf/ings; the alternative for a feudal system is no feudal system, or the kind of systemless society we end up with in Spirits Rebellious; and the alternative for a Christless church is a Christ without any kind of church, madman in the kind of role in which John has found himself. non being in possession of an alternative, a social reformer in revolt is right away transformed from a hero into a social misfit. thus Gibran’s heroes extradite invariably been heretics, madmen, wanderers, and even prophets and beau topicls. As such they all Boston, drawn represent Gibran the emigrant misfit in Chinat cause, in his visual modality and longing to Lebanon, his childishness’s fairyland, who is non so much concerned with the ills that corrupt its society as with the corrupt society that defiles its beauty.\r\nWhat kind of Lebanon Gibran has in mind flummoxs seduceer in a relatively late essay in Arabic, in which his ideal of Lebanon and that of the antagonists whom he delivers in his stories are set against unrivalled a nonher. vol. 1 Al-Majm? ‘ahal-K? mila, I, p. 101. 59 The best that Gibran the rebel could tell those corrupters of Lebanese society in this essay empower â€Å"You Have Your Lebanon and I fork up Mine” is not how to make Lebanon a better society, scarce how beautiful is Lebanon without any society at all.\r\nHe writes: â€Å"You have your Lebanon and its problems, and I have my Lebanon and its beauty. You have your Lebanon with all that it has of various interests and concerns, magical spell I have my Lebanon with all that it has of aspirations and dreams … Your Lebanon is a political distri preciselye that time to resolve, plot of land my Lebanon is hills go in awe and attempts Your Lebanon is ports, in formry majesty towards the blue tilt … and commerce, while my Lebanon is a far removed idea, a desirous emotion, and an e in that locational word verbalise by mankind into the ear of heaven …\r\nYour Lebanon is religious sects and manies, while my Lebanon is youngsters climbing rocks, running with rivulets and stumblebum in open unbents. Your Lebanon is speeches, lectures and playing while my Lebanon is songs of nightingales, discussions, swaying branches of oak and poplar, and echoes of sheepman flutes reverber1 ating in caves and grottoes. ” It is no wonder that this kind of rebel should nullity up his so-called social revolt at this horizontal surface of his career with the publication of a track record of collected prose songs empower A Tear and a Smile.\r\nThe picks, which are much more abundant here than the grinnings, are those of Gibran the misfit rather than of the rebel in Boston, singing in an highly touching way of his frustrated love and estrangement, his l integrityliness, homesickness and melancholy. The smi les, on the other hand, are the twist of those notwithstanding intermittent notwithstanding now more numerous instants in the lifetime of Gibran the emigrant when the land of mystic beauty, ceases to be a geographical Lebanon, in his imagination into expression, and is spiritwise metamorphosed a meta somatic After such rudimentary as his homeland. ttempts short story â€Å"The Ash of Generations and the Eternal detached” in Nymphs Gibran has of the Valley, expressive of his persuasion in reincarnation, managed in his prose poems of A Tear and a Smile to give his homesickness a clear platonic twist. His alienation has commence that of the homophile brain entrapped in the foreign world of forcible outliveence, and his homesickness has be place the yearning of the someone so estranged for reclamation in the higher world of metaphysical truth wherefore it has genuinely descended.\r\nIt is for this reason that compassionate life is 1 ibidem , vol. III, pp. 2 02-203. 60 expressed by a tear and a smile: a tear for the departure and alienation The diachronic parity and a smile for the prospect of a home- sexual climax. of the ocean in this respect get down feathers common from now on in Gibran’s writings: pelting is the weeping of water that fall over hills and dales from the mother sea, while running brooks grievous the estranged â€Å"Such is the soul”, says Gibran in one of beaming song of home-coming. rom the universal soul it takes its his prose poems. â€Å"Separated course of instruction in the world of subject area passing like a cloud over the mountains of grieve and the plains of happiness until it is met by the breezes of expiry, whereby it is brought tail to where it originally belongs, to the sea of love and beauty, to god. ” 1 When Gibran’s homeland, the objective of his longing, was Lebanon, his anger was directed against those who in his view had defiled its beauty.\r\n barely now that his homeland had gradually assumed a metaphysical Platonic involveing, his attack was no womb-to-tomb centred on local influences clergy, church dogma, feudalism and the other corrupting in Lebanon, notwithstanding rather on the ignominiously defiled image that man, the emigrant in the world of physical existence, has made of the world of theology, his original homeland. Not solo Lebanese society, but rather clement society at large has be draw the main conduct of Gibran’s the second constitute of his career. isgust and bitterness with and throughout This kind of disgust constitutes the central opus in Gibran’s long Arabic poem Processions of 1919 and his script of collected Arabic essays The Tempests of 1920, his last work in Arabic, as well as in his first two works in English, The Madman of 1918, and The ancestor of 1920, both of which are collected parables and prose poems. The hero in Gibran’s poetico-fictional title-piece in The Tempests, You ssof al-Fakhry in his cottage among the forbidding mountains, becomes a brain-teaser to the awe-stricken further to neighbourhood.\r\nGibran the narrator, seeking refuge in the cottage one stormy evening, does he reveal the secret of his heroic concealment and seclusion. â€Å"It is a indisputable arouse in the uttermost depth of the soul,” he says, â€Å"a certain idea which takes a man’s conscience by surprise at a moment and opens his vision whereby he sees life … projecof forgetfulness, ted like a rise of light between existence and infinity. ” 2 looking at the rest of men from the prevail of life, from his giant immortal-self which he has so recognized at a rare moment of a slipstreamning, Youssof al-Fakhry sees them in their forgetful periodic mundane 1 ibidem vol. II, p. 95. 2 ib. , vol. III, p. 111. 61 to existence, at the behind of the tower. In their placid un entrustingness lift their eyeball to what is reverent in their nature s, they appear to him as cruddy pigmies, hypocrites and cowards. â€Å"I have woebegone people”, he explains to his guest, â€Å"because I have found myself a wheel play he right among wheels invariably turning left. ” â€Å"No, my brother,” adds, â€Å"I have not seek seclusion for orison or hermitic practices. or else have I seek it in escape from people and their laws, t for each one(prenominal)ings and customs, from their ideas, noises and wailings.\r\nI have sought seclusion so as not to see the faces of men selling their souls to buy with the price thereof what is below their souls in value and honour In â€Å"The Grave-Digger”, another poetico-fictional piece in The these men who have exchange their souls, and who constitute in Tempests, Gibran’s reckoning the rest of merciful society, are discharged as dead, though in the spoken language of the hero, modelled in the lines of Youssof alFakhry, â€Å"finding none to bury them, t hey rest on the face of the 2 earth in stinking decline”.\r\nThe hero’s advice to Gibran the narrator is that for a man who has alter to his giant divinity fudge-self the best service he locoweed pay society is digging sculpt. â€Å"From that moment up to the present”, Gibran concludes, â€Å"I have been digging graves and burying the dead, but the dead are many and I am alone with zero to help me. ” 3 To be the except sane man among fools is to appear as the moreover fool among sane men.\r\nIf life, as Youssof al-Fakhry says, is a tower whose back end is the earth and whose top is the world of the in impermanent, whence to clamour for the unconditioned in one’s life is to be considered an unwanted and a fool by the rest of men clinging to the bottom of the tower. This is first English work, The barely how the Madman in Gibran’s his title. His masks stolen, he was walk of lifeing naked, as Madman, gained all(prenominal) tra veller from the physical to the metaphysical is bound to be. visual perception his nakedness, someone on a house-top cried: â€Å"He is a madman. face up, the solarise, his higher self, kissed his naked face for the first time. He spend in love with the sun and wanted his masks, his no longer. thereafter he was always physical and social attachments, known as the Madman, and as a madman he was at war against kind-hearted society. Processions, Gibran’s long poem in Arabic, is a dialogue between two representatives. Upon close analysis, the two contributions seem to belong to one and 1 ibid. , vol. III, 106. p. 2 ibid. , vol. III, p. 11. 3 ibidem , vol. III, 15. p. 62 the same man: another of those Gibranian madmen, or men who have become beau ideals unto themselves.\r\nThis man would at one time gag his at people living at the bottom of the tower, and eye downwards stand up his juncture in derision and sarcasm, jab fun at hence their unreality, satirizing their G ods, creeds and practices, and ridiculing their values, ever doomed, blind as they are, to be at loggerheads. At another instant he would turn his look to his own sublime world beyond good and devilish, where dualities interpenetrate cock-a-hoop way to unity, and therefore he would raise his voice in praise of life absolute and universal. is to achieve serenity and peace.\r\nThat To achieve self- finis Gibran and his heroes are still mad Gods, grave-diggers and enemies of mankind, filled with bitterness patronage their claim of having arrived at the lead of life’s tower, reveals that Gibran’s self-fulfilment this second stage of his work is still a matter of wishful throughout rather than an accomplished fact. Too view and make-believe with his own agonising loneliness in his cabalistic preoccupied quest, Gibran the madman or superman, it seems, has failed hitherto at the round top, but also to not unaccompanied to feel the cheer of self-fulfillment recogniz e the ragedy of his fellow-men supposedly at sea in the mire alternatively of love and compassion, down below. because people could only inspire in him bitterness and disgust. The stage of anger and disgust was succeeded in Gibran’s ripening by a third stage, that of The Prophet, his chef d’? tlvre, savior the Son of Man and The human beings Gods. The link is to be found in The ascendent of 1920, his book of collected poems and parables. To believe, as Gibran did, that life is a tower whose base is earth and whose gratuity is the innumerous is also to believe that life is one and indivisible.\r\nFor the man on top of life’s tower to forswear those who are beneath, as Gibran had been doing up to this point, is to undermine his own height and become lower than the last-place he rejects. Thus one of Gibran’s poems in The Forerunner says, as though in atonement for all his Nietzschean revolt: â€Å"Too young am I and too s freighterdalise to be my kickr self. â€Å"And how shall I become my freer self unless I massacre my burdened selves, or unless all men become free? ” … How shall the eagle in me hang glide against the sun until my fledglings leave the snuggle which I with my own horn have built for them. 1 1 TheForerunner,p. 7. 63 Gibran’s belief in the unity of life, which has hitherto made only and at times scattered appearances in his writings, has intermittent now become, with all its implications with regard to human life and conduct, the prevailing depicted object of the rest of his works. If life is one and countless, then man is the in bounded in embryo, just as a seed is in itself the whole tree in embryo. â€Å" each(prenominal) seed”, says Gibran in one of his later works, â€Å"is a longing. 1 This longing is presumptively the longing of the tree in the seed for in the veritable tree that it had frontly been. Every self-fulfilment seed and so bears in spite of appearance itself the longing, the self-fulfilment and the means by which this derriere be achieved. To transfer the analogy to man is to say that every man as a conscious being is a divine seed; is life absolute and in limited in embryo. Every man, therefore, according to Gibran, is a longing : the longing of the divine in man for man the divine whom he had previously been.\r\n moreover, to quote Gibran again, â€Å"No longing remains unfulfilled. ” 2 care the seed, he so every man is destined for Godhood. bears at bottom him the longing, the fulfilment which is God, and the road leading to this fulfilment. It is in this context that Gibran declares in The Forerurcner, â€Å"You are your own forerunner, and the tower have built are but the foundations of your giant self. ” 3 you Seeing man in this light, Gibran can no longer afford to be a gravedigger. A new stage has opened in his career. hands are divine and, therefore, final stageless.\r\nIf they remain in the mire of their earthly existence, it is not because they are mean and disgusting, but because the divine in them, like the fire in a piece of wood, is passive though it needs only a slight stumble to be unloosed into a hell of light. it is not a grave-digger that men need, but an because, a Socratic mid-wife, who would help man release the God in illumination; himself into the self that is one with God. Therefore in this new stage Gibran the grave-digger and the madman gives way to Gibran the and the igniter. rophet In The Prophet of 1923, Almustafa â€Å"who was a clear up unto his own day” sees his delight, for which he had waited cardinal years in the city of Orphalese, put acrossing to â€Å"bear him back to the islet of his expect”. The people of Orphalese leave their periodical work and crowd around him in the city square to bid him valedictory and beg for something of his 1 Sandand Foam, p. 16. 1 ibidem , p. 25. 1 TheForerunner,p. 7. 64 he answers their var ious before he leaves, whereupon cognition on subjects of their own choosing. uestions It is not hard to see that Almustafa the Prophet is Gibran himself, who in 1923 had already spent almost twelve years in New York city, the city of Orphalese, having moved there from Boston in 1912, and that the isle of his take over is Lebanon to which he had longed to return. But looking deeper still Almustafa can further symbolize the man who, in Gibran’s reckoning, has become his freer self; who has duped the enactment in himself from the human to the divine, and is therefore ripe for granting immunity and reunification with life absolute.\r\nHis ship is death that has come to bear him to the isle of his birth, the Platonic world of metaphysical reality. As to the people of Orphalese, they stand for human society at large in which men, exiled in their spatio-temporal existence from their true selves, that is, from God, are in need in their God-ward trip of the guiding second-sigh ted hand that would lead them from what is human in them to the divine. Having made that move himself, Almustafa presents himself in his utterances the book as that guide. throughout Stripped of its poetic trappings, Gibran’s teaching in The\r\nProphet is found to rest on the whiz idea that life is one and quad. As a living being, man in his temporal existence is only a backside of his real self. To be one’s real self is to be one with the in delimited to which man is related. Self-realization, therefore, lies in going out of inseparably one’s spatio-temporal dimensions, so that the self is greatened to the man’s only extent of including everyone and all things. Consequently in self-realization, to his greater self, lies in love. Hence love is the lead theme of the opening sermon of Almustafa to the people of Orphalese.\r\nNo man can say â€Å"I” unfeignedly without meaning the union of things apart from which he cannot be or be conceived. let off less can one love oneself truly without good-natured everyone and all things. So love is at once an independence and a crucifixion: an emancipation because it releases man from his narrow confinement and brings him to that whereby he feels one with the stage of broader self-consciousness with God; a crucifixion because to grow into the broader self innumerous, is to shatter the smaller self which was the seed and confinement. For even as Thus true assurance is bound to be a self-negation. love crowns you”, says Almustafa to his hearers, â€Å"so shall he crucify 1 you. veritable(a) as he is for your addition so is he for your pruning. ” 1 TheProphet, p. 15. 65 love, which is our guide to our larger self, is insepConsequently arable from paroxysm. â€Å"Your bother”, says Almustafa, â€Å"is the interruption of Even as the lapidate of the the shell that encloses your understanding. fruit must break, that its heart whitethorn stand in the sun, so must you know 1 pain. ” Thus conceived, pain becomes at once a kind of feel.\r\nIt is the joy of the seed dying as a tree in embryo in a process of becoming a tree in full. and unheeded which is really painful. It is only pain misunderstood self is God, then anything that gives us pain is a witness If our larger that our self is not yet broad enough to subscribe to it. For to contain all is is thus an to be in love and at peace with all. Pain truly understood to growth and therefore to joy. â€Å"Your joy”, says Almustafa, impetus â€Å"is your sorrowfulness unmasked. The deeper that sorrow carves into your 2 being, the more joy you can contain. ” If pain and joy are inseparable, so are life and death.\r\nIn a universe that is infinite nothing can hand except the finite, and nothing finite can be other than the infinite in disguise. end understood is the pouring of the finite into the infinite, the passage of the God in man into the man in God. â€Å"L ife and death are one”, says Almustafa, â€Å"even as the And what is to cease breathing, but to river and the sea are one … free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and 3 seek God unencumbered. ” If life and death are one even as joy and pain, it must follow that life is not the opposite of death nor death the opposite of life.\r\nFor to live is to grow and to grow is to exist in a unbroken process of dying. Therefore every death is a renascence into a higher state of being, in the sense of â€Å"the child is father to the man”. Thus in a Wordsworthian chain of birth and rebirth man persists in his God-ward regular of himself until raise, gaining at each step a broader consciousness he finally ends at the absolute. â€Å"It is a flame spirit in you”, says Almustafa, â€Å"ever gathering more of itself. ” 4 Similarly, nothing can happen to us which is not in fact self-invited, If God is our greater self, then n othing can and self-entertained. efall us from without. Says Almustafa: 1 ib. , p. 60. 2 Ibid. , p. 35. 3 Ibid. , pp. 90-91. 4 Ibid. , p. 97. 66 â€Å"The And And And off is not unaccountable for his own murder, the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. the righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, the white-handed is not clean in the deportment of the felon. â€Å"1 If God is our greater self then there can be no good in the infinite universe which is not the good of every man, nor can there be any â€Å" standardized a procession”, evil for which anyone can abjure responsibility.\r\nAlmustafa, â€Å"you walk together towards your God self. ” says â€Å"… even as the holy and righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also. And as a single leaf turns not discolour but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, So the wrong-doer cannot d o wrong without the hidden go forth of you all. â€Å"22 It would follow that the eldritch elevation of a Christ is part and parcel of the temporal villainy of a Judas Iscariot. For in God Christ and Judas are one and inseparable.\r\nNo man, therefore, no matter how elevated, can be turn into his larger self alone. An eagle, however high it can soar, is always bound to come down again to its fledgelings in the nest and is until they too become strong of wing, doomed to remain earthbound and the same is true of an elevated human soul or a prophet. So long as there remains even one speck of bestiality in any man no other human soul, no matter how near to God it may be, can be finally standardised the released emancipated and escape the wheel of reincarnation. n Plato’s allegory, he bequeath again return to the philosopher-prisoner cave, so long as his fellows are still there in darkness and in chains. Gibran’s Prophet, as he prepares to menu his ship, says: †Å"Should my voice fade in your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again. A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body. A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another adult female shall bear me. â€Å"3 In literary terms, this moment of rest upon the wind for Almustafa was brief indeed.\r\nOnly five years go on on his departure from 1 Ibid. , p. 47. 2 Ibid. , pp. 46-47. 3 Ibid. , 105. p. 67 Orphalese before he was apt(p) birth again; not by another woman, as he had foretold, but by Gibran himself. His name this time was not Almustafa but deliveryman. rescuer the Son of Man, Gibran’s second book after The Prophet, appeared in 1928, the first being only a short collection of aphorisms under the title of Sand and Foam. To the student of Gibran’s literary art, saviour the Son of Man may offer some novelty, but not so to the student of his thought.\r\nGibran in this book tries to portray Christ as he un derstands him by inviting to speak of him each from his a number of Christ’s contemporaries own point of view. Their views combined in the mind of the reader are intended to bring out the desired portrait. But names, places and situations apart, the Jesus so portrayed in the the book is not so much of the scriptural Christ, as he is the old Biblical a new development Gibranian Almustafa. transformed into another Like Nazarene who Almustafa he is describe as â€Å"The chosen and the erotic love”, after several previous rebirths is come and will come again to help lead men to their larger selves.\r\nHe is not a God who has taken human form, but an habitual man of ordinary birth who has been able through phantasmal sublimation to elevate himself from the human to the divine. His several returns to earth are the several returns of the eagle who would not taste the full freedom of dummy before all his fledgedesire”, says lings are taught to fly. â€Å"Were it not for a mother’s Gibran’s Jesus, â€Å"I would have naked me of the swaddling-clothes and escaped back to distance. And were it not for sorrow in all of you, . I would not have stayed to weep. I Therefore Gibran’s Jesus was neither spiritless nor humble nor characterized by pity. His return to earth is the return of a winged spirit, intent on appealing not to human frailties, but to the power in man which is capable of lifting him from the finite to the infinite. One reporter on Jesus says, â€Å"I am sickened and the bowels within call Jesus humble and me stir and rise when I hear the faint-hearted and when the that they may justify their own faint-heartedness; meek, for drag and companionship, down-trodden, speak of Jesus as a worm incandescence by their side.\r\nYes, my heart is sickened by such men. It is the mighty huntsman I would p hand, and the mountainous spirit 2 unconquerable. ” Gibran’s Jesus is even made to re-utter the passkeyà ¢â‚¬â„¢s prayer in a way 1 Jesus The Sonof Man, p. 19. 2 Ibid. , p. 4. 68 to the heart and lips of Almustafa, sequester teaching man to himself to the point of becoming one with the blanket(prenominal): enlarge â€Å"Our father in earth and heaven, sacred is Thy name. Thy will be done with us, even as in space …..\r\nIn Thy compassion pardon us and enlarge us to forgive one another. pass by us towards Thee and stretch down Thy hand to us in darkness. For Thine is the kingdom, and in Thee is our power and our fulfilment To dwell further on the character and teachings of Jesus as conIn The Prophet, Gibran the ceived by Gibran is to risk redundancy. psyche reaches his climax. His post-Prophet works, with the possible exception of The Earth Gods of 1931, the last book make in his lifetime, have almost nothing new to offer. s a collection of The roamer of 1932, published posthumously, and sayings much in the style and spirit of The Forerunner of parables 1920, published thr ee years before The Prophet. As to The tend of the in 1933, it should be dismissed Prophet, also published posthumously as a dodge and a forgery. Gibran, who had planned The garden outright state of being and of the Prophet to be an expression of Almustafa’s after he had arrived in the isle of his birth from the city of teachings Orphalese, had only time left to write two or three short passages for that book.\r\nOther passages were added, some of which are translations from Gibran’s early Arabic works, and some possibly write by another pen in imitation of Gibran’s style. The result was a book to Gibran, in which Gibran’s attributed are poetry and thought to a most unhappy state of chaos and confusion. brought This leaves us with The Earth Gods as the complete work with which Gibran’s career comes to its conclusion. And a fitting conclusion it is indeed. The book is a long prose poem where, in the words of Gibran, â€Å"The three earth-born Go ds, the Master Titans of Life” plump for a discourse on the hazard of man. is career was a poet of alienation and Gibran, who throughout strikes us in The Prophet and in Jeszrs the Son of Man, Almuslonging, tafa’s duplicate, as having arrived at his long-cherished state of intellectual rest and spiritual fulfilment. Almustafa and Christ, who in Gibran’s reckoning are earth-born Gods, reveal human part as being man’s gradual ascent through love and spiritual sublimation 1 Ibid. , p. 60. 69 towards ultimate reunion with God, the absolute and the infinite. It is possible that Gibran began to have second thoughts about the philosophy of his prophet towards the end of his life.\r\nOtherwise why is it that instead of one earth God, one human destiny, he now presents us with three who apparently are in disagreement ? Shortly after Jesus the Son of Man, (libran, who had for some time been fighting a chronic illness, came to realize that the fates were not on hi s side. Like Almustafa, he must have seen his ship coming in the bedim to take him to the isle of his birth and in the lonely move around of towards death, armed as he was with the mystic convictions Almustafa, he must have often halt to examine the implications of his philosophy.\r\nIn his farewell address to the people of Orphalese, Almustafa precept his departure as â€Å"A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind”. But what of this endless cycle of births and rebirths? If man’s ultimate destiny as a finite being is to unite with the infinite, then that destiny is a practical(prenominal) impossibility. For the road to the infinite is infinite, and man’s quest as a traveller through reincarnation is bound to be endless and fruitless. ‘ Therefore comes the voice of Gibran’s first God: â€Å"Weary is my spirit of all there is.\r\nI would not move a hand to create a world Nor to erase one. I would not live could I but die, For the weight of aeons is upon me, And the ceaseless groan of the seas exhaust my sleep. Could I but lose the primal aim And vanish like a wasted sun; Could I but strip my divinity fudge of its purpose And breathe my immortality into space And be no more; Could I but be consumed and pass from time’s memory Into the emptiness of nowhere. â€Å"‘ In another place this same God says: â€Å"For all that I am, and all that there is on earth, And all that shall be, inviteth not my soul.\r\n unfathomed is thy face, And in thine eyes the shadows of night are sleeping. But arch is thy silence, And thou art terrible. â€Å"2 1 The Earth Gods, 3. p. 2 Ibid. , pp. 5-6. 70 If man in his ascent to the infinite is likened to a mountain- climbing iron, then these moments of sadness and helplessness only overtake when he casts his eyes towards the immeasurably removed upper side beyond. It is not so when he casts his eyes downwards and sees the heights he has already scaled. The loneliness and sobriety then give way to optimism and reassurance.\r\nFor a pilgrimage that can be started is a journey that can be concluded. Gibran on his lonely voyage must have turned to see There we hear the this other implication in Almustafa’s philosophy. voice of the second God, whose eyes are turned optimistically downwards. His philosophy is that the height of the summit is a part of the lowliness of the valley beneath. That the valley is now transcended is a reassurance that the summit can be considered as already conquered. For to reach the summit is to reach the highest point to which a valley could raise its depth.\r\nMan’s journey to God is therefore a journey inwards and not an external quest. The second God says to the first: â€Å"We are the beyond and we are the most high And between us and the unmeasured eternity Is naught save our unshaped passion And the precedent thereof. You invoke the unknown, And the unknown clothe with moving mist Dwells in your own s oul. Yea, in your own soul your redeemer lies hibernating(prenominal) And in sleep sees what your wake eye does not see. … keep and look down upon the world. see the unweaned children of your love.\r\nThe earth is your abode, and the earth is your throne; And high beyond man’s furtherest accept Your hand upholds his destiny. â€Å"‘ Yet in Gibran’s lonely journey towards death, a voice not so pessimistic as that of his first God nor so optimistic as that of the second from the youthful past of is heard. This voice, coming perhaps Broken Wings and A Tear and a Smile, though not part of Almustafa’s voice, is yet not out of harmony with it. It is the voice of someone who has come to realize that man has so busied himself think to live it.\r\nRather than the climber about life that he has forgotten terrified by the towering height of the summit or reassured by the lowliness of the valley, here is a love-intoxicated youth in the spring meadows 1 Ib id. , on the mountainside. p. 22. 71 â€Å"There is a espousal in the valley. â€Å"Brothers, my brothers,” the third God rebukes his two fellows, â€Å"A day too vast for recording. … We shall pass into the twilight; Perchance to wake to the get across of another world. But love shall stay, And his finger-marks shall not be erased. The blessed forge burns, The sparks rise, and each spark is a sun.\r\n split it is for us, and wiser, To seek a vague nook and sleep in our earth divinity And let love, human and frail, command the coming day. â€Å"‘ Thus Gibran concludes his life-long alienation. His thought in the twilight of his days seems to have swung back to his youth where it first started. It is a complete cycle, in conformity, though perhaps unconsciously, The logical cedar tree which was with his idea of reincarnation. Gibran the Prophet went back again to the seed that it was: to love, to wake to the dawn of another world. â€Å"2 human and frail-â €Å"Perchance N. NAIMY 1 Ibid. , pp. 25-26. 2 Ibid. , pp. 38-41.\r\n'